Brendan Hoban: Will it be Groundhog Day for Church reform?
Western People 1.10.2024
Remember the Grand Old Duke of York immortalised in the words of the nursery rhyme?
Oh! The grand old Duke of York
He had ten thousand men
He marched them up to the top of the hill
And he marched them down again.
It’s clear now that the reforms sponsored by Pope Francis (and the bearers of such hope for the future of the Catholic Church) are once again in danger of being kicked down the road.
I’ve been looking back a bit to a speech given by the then archbishop of Dublin, Diarmuid Martin and to a book I wrote in 1995.
The main thesis of Martin’s speech was that the Catholic Church in Ireland in the future would have to be very different from the past. In my book, Change or Decay, Irish Catholicism in Crisis, I wrote more or less the same thing. My main point was that unless we were prepared to embrace change that the Catholic Church in Ireland would die on its feet.
Almost 30 years ago now, I wrote in the introduction:
‘The Catholic Church in Ireland is, in a number of key areas, in free-fall. Yet extraordinarily we still seem reluctant to face the truths that everyone else can recognise. A feudal church is incapable of conversing with today’s world. And unless we embrace change the Irish Catholic Church will turn over and die – unless we are prepared to move from denial to reality, from self-interest to gospel courage, from a necessary dying to a new way of living.’
In effect, what Martin was saying was that we needed to embrace change so that we could re-make, re-create and re-imagine a new and very different Church. Which is more or less what Pope Francis is attempting now.
At the time the outline of Martin’s ideas was clear: the old arrogance of an insensitive and domineering institution had to change; ‘the narrow culture of clericalism’ had to be eliminated; the Church had to become ‘a People’s Church’ with the people driving change; and so on.
What he didn’t say is what almost everyone else was saying: that we needed to re-image priesthood for a different world; that celibacy for all priests needed to be looked at; that the promise of women priests needed to be addressed; and that church teaching in sexual matters needed attention.
Martin didn’t say that because, at that time, it would have been a bridge too far. He had to be politically astute; he had to watch his back. So he half-said what needed to be said and while at the time half a loaf was better than no bread, the irony is that while Martin was said to be ‘going too far’, the reality (as we now know) was that he wasn’t going far enough. He didn’t foresee or at least suggest that a more fundamental shift was needed – from Roman control to local collegiality and from clerical control to lay decision-making.
But so far, so good. The great truth Martin named was the reluctance and the failure of the Catholic Church to change. An instance of this, Martin suggested, was what he called ‘signs of subconscious denial’ in our attitude to the child abuse revelations. After all that has happened, there were (he said) ‘still strong forces which would prefer that the truth did not emerge.’
That reluctance then to name the truth and, according to Martin, to proceed accordingly with effective and monitored child protective measures were indicative of a wider denial: about religious practice; about vocations; about faith; about ‘Catholic’ schools; about transparency in financial matters; about our penchant for setting up new structures and pretending that therefore something is happening; and so forth.
The task of the Catholic Church was about personal and institutional renewal, getting back to the basics of what we are and what we do and jettisoning that oppressive and controlling culture that hindered us not just from engaging with the lived concerns of our people but that helped divest the gospel message of Jesus Christ of outdated and irrelevant baggage.
I remember at the time asking the question in this column: have we the will and the capacity to change? And pointing out that it was all very well for Archbishop Martin to say that there will be a very different Catholic Church in Ireland in the future. But who will change what needs to be changed?
Rome wouldn’t, because the evidence up to then was that Rome won’t countenance any significant change. The sounds coming out of Rome since the Council – indicated that we were going backwards not going forward, holding back rather than pushing forward, about keeping control rather than encouraging freedom.
I suggested that the clergy wouldn’t do it because, even then, we were too old, too tired and too dispirited as well as lacking the resources, the energy and the direction to plot a course into the future.
The people wouldn’t do it because already they were telling us that it was probably too late. So many had walked away, so many were still in the pews but their minds were no longer with us, so many heard promises before of what was going to happen and nothing did, so their capacity to respond to the challenges of the present was limited.
Then years later Pope Francis arrived on the scene and suddenly more than what Diarmuid Martin had predicted and even more than I had imagined was not just possible but deemed necessary as there was no Plan B.
That seems to have changed as recently Francis indicated that at the Synod that starts in Rome tomorrow no change might be expected – at this stage.
Surely it can’t be that once again at this synod, Francis (like the grand old Duke of York) having marched his troops up to the top of the hill will just march them down again?
Did Jesus ever intend that from among his followers there would emerge a separate priestly caste, so exclusively devoted to religious affairs that it would need to be supported financially by everyone else?
Jesus’ own emphatic indictment of religious hypocrisy is surely the starkest possible warning against the danger of ‘paying somebody to be holy’ – the obvious danger that those whose livelihood will depend upon an appearance of holiness will collaborate to conceal their worst faults from everyone else. The result would be exactly what we have experienced: institutionalised hypocrisy, a bombshell waiting to explode – to scandalise the external ‘secular’ world.
St Paul’s sensitivity on this very issue, and his insistent claim that he was self-supporting (Acts 20:33-35), surely pointed to a very different possible future for the church: that to emphasise the equality of all of the baptised before God, and to reduce the danger of hypocrisy, everyone would, by rule, be self-supporting.
If the revelation of the concealment of clerical child sex abuse had come from within the clerical church itself the shock would not have been half so great. That the first revelations came instead from outside that sphere, in a secularised and pluralistic society (the USA), is surely still totally stunning. The Church that was One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic was also so deeply hypocritical that it was not self-correcting either.
That stark fact has still to be acknowledged by any pope – yet another reality that Catholics are left to make sense of. Other Christian churches with a stipendiary (or ‘professional’) clergy have had a similar experience. No wonder that the fastest growing Christian Church of our time is the Church of the Lost Sheep – a church that Jesus himself seems to have foreseen.
“Did Jesus ever intend that from among his followers there would emerge a separate priestly caste…..”
Seán, you will find the answer to that question in a very comprehensive and scholarly way in Garry Wills’ excellent book, “Why Priests?”
As to the cover-up of the clerical child sex abuse scandal we now know beyond all doubt that John Paul II was the ultimate author of the policy of cover-up and denial, concerned with protecting the criminals who committed such evil and protecting the image and property of the institution while showing little, if any, concern for the innocent children who were being so violated.
However, we must now also recognise the decency of Francis who said, just before he left Belgium last week, that evil must never be tolerated and those responsible for that evil must always be called to account.
For Gary Wills, Paddy, the issue is priesthood – but the issue I raise is the bifurcation of the church in the emergence of a religious overclass financially supported by the rest. Since the essence of Christian priesthood is service it wasn’t inevitable that ordained Christians – those tasked especially with a liturgical and sacramental role – would also become that financially separated and ruling overclass. Jesus did not manage the finances of the group who followed him – and that separation could have been strictly maintained in the structure of the church.
Pope John Paul II did indeed both know about and fail to address the problem of clerical child sex abuse, but the policy of secrecy on this issue did not begin with him. Tom Doyle’s indispensable ‘very short history of clergy sexual abuse’ tells us that secrecy on this matter was mandated at the highest level soon after the promulgation of the code of canon law in 1917. Its origins should probably not be attributed to any individual in particular but to the fear of scandal that the emergence of mass print media in the later 1800s had probably intensified. A fortress church, defensively defending its reputation still against the Enlightenment as well as Protestant reform propaganda, was understandably defending this particular vulnerability also.
http://www.crusadeagainstclergyabuse.com/htm/AShortHistory.htm
Pope Francis arrived after the storm had already broken, and has at least recognised that the policy of secrecy on this matter is now a liability – but he has not authorised a discovery of its origins. That too is a significant limiting factor – especially in the context of revelations that now compromise all of the church’s teaching orders. Many of the revelations of secretive abuse in Irish Catholic schools originate in events before the arrival of Pope John Paul II in 1978.
I believe that it is to the nexus of professedly celibate priestly power and clerical financial reliance upon the trust of ‘the faithful’ we need to look for the origins of this disaster. The resolution of it all will continue long after our own demise.
Not for nothing did Jesus say ‘I know mine, and mine know me.’ (John 10:14)
Sean, here is an interesting article on Gregory of Nyssa’s ideas of atonement: https://digitalcommons.acu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1010&context=conversations
That’s truly fascinating Joe – thanks. And just one reading of it won’t be enough. As Dualism is implicit in any understanding of Satan’s revolt as eternal it seems to make sense that he too should eventually be reconciled.